Remember C64?

That's unlike me, isn't it? I go travelling, and hardly two blog posts come your way. And I was disappointed myself in their length and quality.

If you want me to tell you the truth, it's because Macs make me nervous. I don't trust them with long stints of typing, it's not natural. Plus, the keyboard was stiff in places, and instead of dust and dirt jammed underneath the perspex, there was a curiously large spider.

Anyway, I'm back in England, and filled with mixed feelings. Why? Because part of me wants to stay here, part of me wants to go back. I love England, it's a wonderful country, and it's my home. Most people I know are here, my stuff is here, I have my own room full of rubbish, it's the way I've known it. Canada is also a wonderful country, with shockingly friendly people everywhere you go. It doesn't have my stuff, but it does have some family and friends. A return flight costs nothing, and I'm seriously about going back for a couple of months before I leave.

But! There are some problems with Canada. I'm sure I already mentioned the limiting speed limit. It doesn't end there. While it doesn't have nearly the same SUV infestation that America does (I didn't see a single Hummer), it is full of pick-up trucks. Roan drives one even. But I can see the use of them. Roan carts stuff around all the time. But still, there are more than I'd like in my country. Plenty of Estate cars as well, which I just plain don't like. However, redeeming much of this, thousands of Subarus! I even drove one for the first time. It wasn't an Impreza, but it did have all wheel drive and was pretty responsive. This one belonged to Anna, Leitha's friend. They are mostly Estate or SUV crossovers, but still, Subarus, they're quality vehicles. I am dreaming of owning one still.

But what's the point of a fast car if you have speed limits that never get close to 120kmh? It would be a very restrictive time for me to live there. My patience would die out and all my savings would go straight onto speeding fines.

Anyway, it'd be fun to go there and fix up the Reliant K car, hang out with cousins more, and just get more of a feel for the place. I mean, come on, their province is bigger than my country. Plus, Roan and I are planning to fix up the cars and sell them on for profit, increasing our fixing until we can afford that Fury. While driving back from the Milford Lodge, Roan spotted a nice looking car, and instructed me to turn around and go and take a look. When we got there, we saw it was a 1968 Plymouth Fury, in alright condition. The owner saw us pull into his drive, and came to see who we were. We struck up a long conversation about the car and about music (he and Roan had played with some of the same people). The car had been sitting for a while so wouldn't start, but otherwise was in good condition. It needed some paint work and maybe even a reupholstering, but it was drivable and shockingly beautiful. He wanted $1700 for it, which I'm sure we could have argued down to $1200. Well, it became our goal. That's something to return for.

A few months ago, I bought a PSP. I haven't spoken about it much, but it's been a great thing to have. On holiday it saved me from all the times I was stuck alone. While touring Spain and France I watched most of a new anime and in Canada it brought me the rest with some Family Guy as well. I also put some albums on it, and as soon as I found out Val had wireless, I was set. While I was there, I bought GTA Vice City Stories, and boy, did that throw me back to my youth. I really am getting back into gaming in a big way, and the PSP has helped. I'm still looking for MGS3 second hand, I never got to play it back in the day, and I have to do something about that before MGS4 comes out.

I could have typed out blog posts on my PSP, it's true. It would have saved me from the Mac, but it didn't seem worth it with all the clicking and entering more than fifteen characters of text taking a while. So I used it for browsing more than writing. And while I bought a few second hand games, I also bought some new hardware. Computer hardware I tend to go for new stuff, knowing that it can wear out and fail, and leave you with nothing. The same can happen with new stuff, but it's under warranty. So I have a new DVDRW and a brand new mouse. The last mouse I had, was a expensive Microsoft Intelimouse, which cost me around £50. It was very good, but it wore out. It started double and triple clicking on left click and middle click, which is murder on tabbed browsing. I feel it should have lasted more than the four years it did, but maybe that's optimism gone too far.

I went and purchased the top end Razer mouse in Canada. It cost about $60, which is less than the £41 it is here. It has 2000dpi, which is murder in the Windows environment, but stunningly fun in the FPS environment. I had a frantic bout of Half Life 2: Episode One last night. I'm eager for Portal more than anything else to be honest. I tried out Narbacular Drop, which one could assume is the prequel, and I have had to stop myself from playing in case I ruin Portal for myself.

I am yet to install my DVDRW drive, which will replace my existing one which no longer writes or reads CDs. Which is bad because all the music I listen to in the car is CD based. Anyway, now I can take the old one and make a laser pointer out of the laser.

Before I go, I should mention, the anime I watched on my PSP was The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi. It's writing and storytelling method I regard as on par with Lost. Not quite as enjoyable, but close. I'm overjoyed at the news of a second season, and I recommend anyone who is into good storytelling and anachronous plots.

But that's enough for now.

Left Right

The first thing I should point out here is that I haven't been submerged for about three and a half years or so. This is because I don't really like swimming. Since my parents had a really good shower installed, I haven't had a bath. The same has been true through all my University accommodation. It's always been showers. So I haven't been underwater for a very, very long time.

So I'm in Canada. I heard about this lodge trip on which my sister and mother were going, and I thought it would be cool, and I have been out in the Milford Lodge (one recalls the Milford Academy) for two days.

It's a set of wooden lodges on the front of a reasonably large lake. Supplied are many canoes and paddles. I haven't been canoeing since I was about 10 and that was in the Thames. But here I was, with a genuine Canadian Canoe, all to myself, with my cousin and sister paddling around me. It was good fun. After we set out on a small row around our most local lake, we stopped by a floating platform near our lodge. My sister, in looking for her mooring rope, capsized and went in. I was quite impressed; it's usually difficult to capsize those things unless you mean to.

We had a very long row the next day to a remote beach (probably only accessible by canoe). Messy sandwiches and sunburn later, we rowed back as fast as we could, through semi-rapids (Pike's Run), and over massive lakes. It took us about an hour and a half to get back, but that's after four hours (or so) to get there.

As we approached our home lodge, I felt hot and bothered enough to want to tip the boat over. I didn't, as Becky was with me, but after we landed I suggested it to Roan (cousin), and he was more than eager. So for the first time in nearly four years, I went underwater. We tipped the boat and went in. It wasn't really cold, in places it was warm, but we even managed to get all the water out of it afterwards (in shallower water). I got in again, and as Roan did, it tipped, and the canoe sank slowly. And that was the most fun. It could even be considered accidental.

We tipped it a few more times, and the trip slowly came to a close. We made it back to Mahone Bay, where we were staying with the rest of the family. Since then, we've done a lot of fun things, the main one being searching for a "woods beater", or a very cheap car to thrash through the woods and then scrap. We found a little Mazda 323 in red which would only cost $50 (Canadian), which is nothing, but the car needed to be released by police, which even to this day it hasn't been. Eventually (yesterday), we bought a 1989 Plymouth Reliant K, which cost us $200, but we didn't have the plan to destroy it. We plan to keep it and sell it t Roan's girlfriend as her first car by the end. It's just an old car, and it has a few things wrong (old radiator, burst brake lines), but I'm going to give some time today to repairing it, so I can take it through the woods and dirt roads briefly before I leave tonight.

When I get back to England tomorrow morning, I can relay more of my adventures, such as my new gaming mouse and DVD writer. But until then I'm going to repair some car.

Here and Now

I'm on a Mac again. And it's in great condition, hardly any software, not much running, and still, it takes hours for the letters to appear on the screen. It only has one task, why can't it do it right? Seriously, it's like having Hugh Grant as a keyboard.

Why am I on a Mac? It's a long story. I'm not at Sarah's anymore. Most of you know my sister went on her Around the World Gap Year trip. So I said goodbye to her in March, and she's only back in England September 5th. That's a hell of a long time to not see your sister for (I was away seven weeks before and that was long, but this has been horrible). For her last two weeks, she's in Canada, for my cousin's 21st birthday (Roan, I went to Ireland with him last Christmas with Yunhae, you remember!). I've been wanting to go, but tickets were around five hundred pounds. Far too much. I found one for 400, but still, it was too much. Eventually, I found one for 275, and my father agreed that I should be there, especially since my mother was flying out to be there as well, a big family get together. Then I found the exact same flight for 210 pounds. Bargain. And I'm here, in Nova Scotia. And I love it. Canada's like the holy grail of countries for me. It's got awesome family, it's beautiful and everything is cheap. It's a very easy going lifestyle.

Anyway, I can't go into details, it's late, and I should be sleeping soon, but I thought you should know. Driving here, by the way, is horrible. The cars are alright (hardly any German cars apart from Volkswagens), but the speed limits are draconian, and brutally enforced by hundreds of police cars. Major highways, and you can't go more then 60mph.

I'll let you know more soon, like tomorrow, we go to a remote lodge for a few days. I'll be on soon!

Back in Drive

As I write this, my hosting is suspended. This basically means that no one will be able to read this until it's paid again. This has happened because my Debit Card has now expired. Luckily, the bank decided to forget to send me a new one, so I don't have one for now. This means I'm stuck living off cash. It also made paying for my car hard. But I have my car back, it's repaired (new head gasket, cam belt and full service), and it drives beautifully. To test it out, I drove it to Cambridge, to stay with Sarah for a couple of days. I'm bored as hell at home, and while I am here (in Cambridge), I'm getting away from the city smog and hopefully some dirt roads will avail themselves.

Sadly, Sarah's family only has a Mac. An iMac. An old one. Not that old, around 2001-2. So it's about six years old. It's never had its OS upgraded, and has only had simple family use.

The keyboard and mouse are set in beautiful perspex, which looks very nice. Until all the crumbs, finger dirt and hairs slide down underneath the perspex, never to be dislodged and to stay there, glaringly disgusting, for all eternity.

On top of that, the failed version of a task bar, you know, all the icons that grow when you go near them, they're on the side. When you go to click the back button in Firefox, Finder jumps into your aim and you click that instead. Every single time. But not before the enlarging icons make the whole OS stutter as it works out how to make itself look pretty for you.

Most of the CRT has turned a nice shade of blue. It isn't possible to replace the monitor. This also means that the resolution is stuck at a very low setting. Luckily all the icons grow when you go near them so at this resolution they take up a third of the screen.

Right clicking involves using two hands. But you don't care when your mouse is so aesthetically simple. Until it comes to using the computer for actual computer things, then you start to care again. Even as I type the letters take a few seconds to appear on the screen, at a very basic rate (so the last phrase, 'very basic rate' hadn't even begun to appear on the screen by the time I had finished writing that sentence).

You're all screaming now that it's an old computer, it's had its day and now it's just a relic. It looked good in its time and worked in its time, now it should be upgraded. And also that CRTs fail after time. All of this wouldn't bother me so much apart from the fact that the Gateway we bought as a family in 2000, the one that all of us lived off, that I used the hell out of and didn't turn off for five years... it still works, it works well. You can right click, you can type and it appears as you type, nothing stutters (even though we upgraded the OS and not the processor), we gave it an extra drive for more space, and even though it has a severe adware infection, it is still a much better machine than this ever was. Yes, the CRT monitor broke but it was great because we replaced it without replacing the whole machine. It just worked, and it continued to just work for the last seven years. It can still run new 3D games that come out, something this Mac could never do no matter how new it was.

And although this is old, I have used new Macs and they're no different. They're awful, and if you want a better one you need to buy a new one. That is never true of PCs. PCs aren't nearly as cool as Macs, just as a Bristol Blenheim will never be as cool as a Ford StreetKa. I know which I'd drive.

Anyway, that's been building up in me for years, I'm glad I got it out. You'll all get to read this once I've paid for my hosting again.

I Promised

Ok, if I don't update for this long again, it means I'm dead. Or bored of blogging.

A lot has happened since my last entry, which was made as I scrabbled together my final pieces of work for University. You'll be happy to know that for that final piece of PHP programming I got a good seventy something percent. Since then, I moved out.

Moving out was without a doubt, one of the worst days of my life. We fought hard to get everything done, and I realised, at the pain of my flatmates, that I had a lot of stuff. It was cool that we rented a Ford Transit (which is fantastic, it's so nice to drive a machine that is pure utility, I want to buy one), and it was cool to see everything I had ever brought home, but it was horrible throwing so much stuff away (including my beautiful big blue chair which Kiana was so fond of).

It was stressful. Kiana had already moved out a week or so before, and Mizuki had just returned from Japan the day before, and we were scrubbing everything from behind the washing machine to the bathroom ceiling. But we cleaned the house out, and it was done. When the stress was over, and after I had showered, I dropped Emma off in London, or, at least, I tried. I didn't watch the temperature while I was stopped in traffic, and my car overheated. The £160 repair bill was only made worse by a subsequent (and as of this afternoon still unfinished) repair job to the head gasket that will cost in the £600 range. I haven't driven my BMW in over a month, and it pains me.

But we have lots of cars, and I have been borrowing my parents' cars. Why, just last week my father and I took my mother's car (the MG) all the way from London to Fonchanina, Northern Spain. We found a twisty road on Google Maps, and decided we would make it there, tackling the winding and snaking roads of the Pyrenees, with a trip through Andorra. While I love to blog while travelling, I didn't have a computer there, nor the energy to type out my doings on a mobile phone. So I will write what I remember now.

With myself on the insurance for another week, we woke early Wednesday morning (3AM, August 1st) and drove to Dover. I was destroyed by the fact that I couldn't sleep due to my unfortunate waking hours, and the whole day that we were driving through France, I kept napping. In an open car, that's quite hard, when your father is pushing motorway speeds. But I managed, and we arrived in (near) Pui that evening, to a nice hotel with a tasty dinner. My French had entirely disappeared, and I kept speaking Japanese. Perhaps I only have room for one foreign language at a time. I confused plenty of French proprietors with 'arigatou'.

The next day we finally hit some proper roads. We only managed a couple of hundred miles, but that was because we were going on twisty roads. And roads with hairpins and chicanes are fun. It didn't take long adjusting to driving on the right, but most of the roads were empty, so it didn't matter where you were. That little car has wide tyres, and it's light. Combined with the mid-mounted engine, the turning response is immediate, and you have to be going quite fast and quite tightly just to get some understeer, and even then that disappears when you take the power off. I also drove over the Millau bridge, which was epic. The Top Gear presenters made a trip to the South of France just for that bridge, and I don't blame them. It's huge, and you feel incredible driving over it. We found a nice little hotel in Thuir, just a little north of the France/Spain border, and a wonderful buffet meal followed by a steak made the evening very comfortable. A lack of air-conditioning made it less so, but it wasn't too bad. I almost lost my wallet, but it was in the car the whole time. Lucky me.

The next day was amazing. We woke up in France, drove to Spain, then to France, then to Andorra, then to Spain again, ending in Sort with a modern and very cool hotel, overlooking a river full of canoes. The roads that day were very good fun. My father's driving scared me and my driving scared him, but it didn't matter, because the large amount of grip made it very hard to slide that car. We managed it a few times though. I even got some oversteer, which was great. However, the sun hit me quite badly that day, and my ear is still peeling a little.

Leaving Sort we drove along a variety of tiny Spanish roads, eventually locating Fonchanina, which was the closest town to our twisty road goal. The road was actually dirt, and far too rough for anything but a tractor, but we'd made it there, and could start heading back. The next hotel we found was only one star, but was reasonably comfortable. We baked that night though, and with no drinking water, it wasn't pleasant. One the plus side, a dubbed Spanish version of Independence Day was on during breakfast the next day.

We crossed back into France the next day, and with the most scenic pass over the mountain and one final twisty road, we drove all the way to Perignon, and stopped in a very swish and very expensive hotel, which made us comfortable for our last night on holiday. We drove solidly and quickly the next day, stopping only for one quick lap around Le Mans, and a visit to the Le Mans museum, which showed the history of the race, and some beautiful old cars. Mostly French. But the Mazda 787b was there, which is the ultimate race car for me right now. Then we drove all the way back to the ferry.

That makes it sound like all we did was get in the car and drive to the next hotel, and that's pretty much what it was. It was a driving holiday, seeking out the best mountain roads for pushing the car to its handling limits. And that's what we did, and we loved every second of it.

We got back in last night around 3:30AM, and now I have to go to bed because I have a job interview tomorrow at 9AM, and it's an hour's drive.

It's good to post again. I miss you people, I'll be back in a couple of days to fill you in on the rest of what I've been up to.